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There has never been a better time to have wisely chosen your parents.

Mum and Dad can teach you manners, the value of education and the wonder and challenge of meaningful relationships. They could also be, for many young people in Sydney, the only chance of owning their own home.

"Not in a million years" could Sarah Rich, 36, a primary school teacher, and her husband, Paddy, also a teacher, have afforded their four-bedroom home in Normanhurst had her parents not been able to help with the deposit for their first property.

Their home has quadrupled in value in only nine years, affording the couple a level of financial security they say would be impossible were they starting out now.

Buying was helped, in no small part, by the decision of Mrs Rich's grandparents, in the Depression years, to buy a family home in Wahroonga. For Ted Metcalf, her father, it is still home - as it has been to three generations - and is more a treasured family heirloom than an investment. The average age of the Australian first-home buyer is 33, a figure that has remained steady for a decade. But the proportion of 15- to 24-year-old buyers is falling. In 2000 this age group represented 10 per cent of first-home buyers, down from 15 per cent in 1990.

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Those who have missed out on buying a home have been left behind financially, Canberra University's National Centre for Social and Economic Modelling study into wealth distribution for the Herald has found.

Even though property has now made many of them wealthy, life started out tough for the children of the Depression years. War followed hard on economic disaster. But then things picked up: Western economies boomed for years, jobs were plentiful and home ownership rates rose rapidly in Australia.

Frugal living habits helped too. "Live within your income; don't buy what you can't afford" was the maxim Mr Metcalf's parents taught him. "I think there were fewer things for us to deny ourselves when we were growing up. Eating out was a question of going to the local fish shop and buying fish and chips, and going to the opera was an expensive thing for us, so we'd have one [subscription] that we shared," he said.

By the time house prices took off, the older generations had the highest rates of home ownership and the lowest debts. Not surprisingly, they gained the most. But the downside is that many of their children have been priced out of home ownership.

People do not want to be told they cannot buy a home, said Lisa Montgomery, spokeswoman for Wizard Home Loans. The result has been a growing tendency to mix and match. "Parents are more willing to provide inheritance to children early as a lever to get them into property. Indeed grandparents are buying property with children and siblings are buying together."

Julian Disney, director of the social justice project at the University of NSW, fears we are leaving a "poisoned legacy" for the next generation. "There's going to be a lot of people who don't have parents or grandparents with big capital gains who are just going to be excluded from the market."

The Metcalf family does not envisage ever selling the Wahroonga home, of which Mrs Rich has such fond memories. She hopes her three children will eventually live there, and questions whether, in any case, they would be able to afford homes of their own.

"If Sydney prices keep going like they're going it would be difficult for them. At this rate they could be living at home forever."

Bob Birrell, director of the Centre for Urban and Population Research at Monash University in Melbourne, predicts that no relief is in sight for first-home buyers.

"The dilemma we face is that the middle ring suburbs are dominated by older couples who own their own home and are unlikely, or unwilling, to move."

Potential new home owners are finding their pathway blocked "because so many of the oldies are now sitting and, as far as the frontier [outer suburbs] is concerned, the costs have escalated, making things exceedingly difficult. And we're not going to see any let-up in this for the next 20 years or so because very few of the people who are sitting on property are going to exit. People will stay in their homes for longer and longer until they go to a nursing home or a crematorium," Birrell said.

Banks vie for business from home-owning retirees, offering reverse-mortgages to free-up home equity for holidays, cars or entertainment. But Mr Metcalf said that was a dangerous thing to do.